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can you imagine if the us wins the whole thing!!! think the others hate us now, we win at "their" sport!

It would be interesting to see the world's reaction. I don't think we're there yet, but with the way the field is set up, the US could realistically get to the semis, so maybe we can make everyone else sweat it out.

USA is eliminated in the world cup, falling to Ghana, a nation the size of Oregon with 10% of the US population. Media hype is one thing, reality is another.

Yeah, we're not there yet. Regardless of the size of our country (and we do have a large pool of talent), we just don't seem to be able to get our best athletes to play soccer. Even though a lot of these other nations are far smaller (in size and population), soccer is the only sport many of them have. They starting kicking a ball around as soon as they can walk. We don't share that same passion for the sport, at least not at this moment in time. It's a shame because I really thought they could have made a run here. However, they didn't put together a complete game at all during this tournament. You can't always rely on last-minute goals and being able to climb back from bad starts. They almost always give up a goal early in the match. In a low-scoring sport like soccer, that's hard to always bounce back from.

I've been hearing the arguments by soccer fans for over 20 years as to how the game will grow in popularity in the US, and they often cite the children whose first intro to organized sports is often soccer. What they fail to realize is that while it's a great game for kids, they just as quickly lose interest and go on to other sports as they get older (baseball, basketball, football, hockey, etc.). The US interest in soccer's world cup is, IMO, driven by our competitive national juices rather than by the game itself. Whether it's soccer, chess, or darts, if you pit country to country, we're going to take an interest in the US prevailing. However, that competitive national drive should not be interpreted as a love and passion for the game of soccer. We don't have an appetite for 0-0 outcomes, and when foreign soccer fans point out the complex strategies involved in their game, they have no clue as to how much more complex the strategies behind American sports such as football, baseball, etc. are versus soccer. Will the game grow in the US? Probably to some extent, but largely as a result of changing demoraphics. I was invited to a pro soccer game in the US several years ago. Looking around in the stands, you would have thought I was in a foreign country.

tough to do when all of our best athletes are playing other sports. Could you imagine lebron playing soccer or reggie bush? they would run circles around everyone. Just take a look at a local high school. Your best athletes are playing football,baseball,basketball. In these other countries soccer is all they have.

that would be funny...but true. our players look meek compared to others.

agree 100% for me. rootin on f.b. for team USA and i was asked "didn't know u were such a soccer fan?" answer....i don't really care for it, just want USA to win

This sport needs to enter the 21st century.
Replay is needed for goals, its not hard, play on, someone in the booth has a minute to review, if goal game is stop, minute added back on and play resumes. Hockey does it and works fine.
Can we please have the ref let us know exactly how much time is left. The technology exists.
Time to add a few more refs to the pitch/field. This will eliminate some of the diving that take place and will improve level of play. Those are the easy ones.
Other things to consider is format of WC. Make it a double elimiantion tournament and no ties. The matches in round of 16 and beyond are so much better and its not level of teams.
Please play until you score, no shootouts.
Time to welcome the sport to the 21st century

Agreed....It will be popular every World Cup year for just as long as the US is competitive. You can listen to the TV or radio or read the papers to get a view into why soccer will always remain second/third class sport in the USA. Faked injuries, subjective clock management, lack of offense....are the things that will keep driving the sport back underground as soon as the US teams are ousted from the Cup.

The youth bubble is beginning to burst too. The year round commitment to travel soccer teams is more than kids want to be a part of. There were years of growth as parents wanted to get kids on travel teams instead of "just rec sports". However, the spring commitment is backfiring as kids want to get into other sports. Soccer programs all around us are losing teams and tournaments are beginning to shrink. It won't go away, but unless it changes a bit, it will shrink more.

Same here. US is out and so am I. Ray has a great point. We are competing with countries that are Soccer dominant while all our best athletes play other sports with Soccer scarping the leftovers, and those leftovers are not even athletes that couldn't make other sports. They are below that level and are folks that love only to play soccer. Unless fans get interested than I d'ont see any chance of Soccer making it here. Getting fan interest is not easy. The rules are impossible to understand, the ref can disallow a goal or call a penalty anytime he wants without telling you why, the head of world cup soccer thinks that's great (supposedly it creates controversy in his mind), and the clock is impossible to understand. Given the scarcity of goals and lack of offense, there should be a great need to explain goal disallowance and given the bias of international referees, how can you ever trust them to judge fairly. You can bet your life the disallowance of goals is tied to a refs reasoning that a country shouldn't win, and given the lack of interest in the US (why reward a fan base that has no emotion in the sport) you can bet that bias is most heavily against the US.

NY Brit can't be happy with how England got jobbed on Sunday. Granted, there's no guarantee they would have won even if the goal had been allowed, but it changes the complexion of a game (especially in soccer where goals are at a premium) and it's just wrong to rob of a team of a goal that they justly deserved. Why would you not use the technology to review goals if it's available?

Yeah it was a real sickener. But to be honest I don't think it would have made much difference to the eventual result. Germany were the better team and fully deserved to win. 4-1 was pretty hard to take though.

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story...=simmons/100701

I love the Cup because it stripped away all the things about professional sports that I've come to despise. No sideline reporters. No JumboTron. No TV timeouts. No onslaught of replays after every half-decent play. No gimmicky team names like the "Heat" or the "Thunder." (You know what the announcers call Germany? The Germans. I love this.) No announcers breathlessly overhyping everything or saying crazy things to get noticed. We don't have to watch 82 mostly half-assed games to get to the playoffs. We don't have 10 graphics on the screen at all times. We don't have to sit there for four hours waiting for a winner because pitchers are taking 25 seconds to deliver a baseball.

.......well i would argue that would make it BETTER!

The World Cup just bangs it out: Two cool national anthems, two 45-minute halves, a few minutes of extra time and usually we're done[b]yea just with no stinking score.[/b] Everything flies by. Everything means something. It's the single best sporting event we have by these four measures: efficiency, significance, historical context and truly meaningful/memorable/exciting moments. You know … as long as you like soccer.


Question No. 13: If you could change anything about soccer, what would it be?
I hate how teams milk leads in the last 15-20 minutes by faking injuries and taking forever to sub players. When that Ghana player had to be carried off on a stretcher at the tail end of the America game, then hopped off like nothing ever happened as soon as the stretcher was out of bounds, I thought that was appalling. Actually, it made me want to go to war with Ghana. I wanted to invade them. I'm not even kidding. That's another great thing about the World Cup: Name another sport in which you genuinely want to invade other countries when you lose.
.........very funny and i agree!

ORANJE!!
Maybe i;ll watch now

Yeah that was a great game yesterday. Especially the finish. I'm looking forward to the Spain v Germany game later today. And the final should be a classic whoever Holland are playing.

Spain wins.

wut a boring game. literally put me to sleep, woke up when spain scored...its such a disgrace how they all flop around